Capturing The Safety High Ground

25th Mar 1998

British Airways has taken another lead in air passenger safety with a £20 million investment to install new state-of-the-art flight-deck displays which warn pilots if they are approaching high ground or descending too low when visibility is poor. It will come as standard on all new British Airways jets and will be retrofitted to the carrier’s existing fleet.

The airline is the first in Europe to make a safety commitment of this magnitude to the new Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) and the first to retrofit it to an existing fleet.

British Airways pioneered successful trials with the new EGPWS in one of its Boeing 747-400s and has now ordered 279 EGPWS computers. The first aircraft equipped with the new safety system (a new Boeing 777) will be delivered this week.

British Airways has been closely linked to the development of EGPWS ever since the end of the “cold war” when digital “terrain contour maps”, used for cruise missile guidance, were first de-classified and made available for civil use.

Captain Mike Jeffery, the airline’s Director of Flight Operations, said: “Safety is our first priority at British Airways, and we are consistently taking the lead on new safety initiatives. Airline safety around the world is generally good and improving, but the most serious accidents continue to happen to perfectly serviceable aircraft which are inadvertently flown into the ground.

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“While this has never occurred to a British Airways aircraft, the new system will help our highly trained pilots to address this threat well in advance by displaying colour-coded satellite-data maps of high ground hundreds of miles away, and in graphic detail near airports.”

The new EGPWS combines satellite data of the Earth’s precise contours with readings from the aircraft’s sophisticated navigation systems to place it at the correct position within a ‘virtual-reality’ map.